Working with workspaces

Workspaces are a very powerful and flexible concept of Feng Office for organizing information and controlling user rights. On the other hand, workspaces are not easy to understand for everybody, so make sure you know how to make use of this feature.

Introduction to Workspaces

All information in Feng Office can be organized in workspaces. While advanced editions add the possibility to organize information around clients, projects or folders; workspaces (available in all Feng Office Editions) can frequently be used in a similar way.

Here are some facts about workspaces:

A workspace can be used to represent different concepts for the organization of information. Workspaces are a generic concept, they get their meaning by the way your team uses them.

Workspaces can contain other workspaces. In other words you can build hierarchies of workspaces with up to 10 levels.1) (But be careful: Too many workspaces or a complex structure bear the potential of putting information into the wrong workspace, which makes it invisible for the intended audience or even accessibly for unauthorized users.)

Workspaces are different from traditional folders (as defined in others systems) in the respect that you can not only see what's inside a workspace but also what's inside all sub-workspaces of that workspace. That's the reason why workspaces are much more like filters than like traditional (file systems') folders.

Workspaces are used to control permissions in Feng Office. You can grant a user the right to work with a certain workspace and hide another workspace completely from her. There are even more detailed permission parameters (which are discussed in more detail on the understanding user rights page).

Selecting a workspace

The most obvious way for selecting a workspace is to have the left sidebar open and to click on a workspace. As long as you don't hide your sidebar, this is the preferred method.

If your left sidebar is hidden, then you have the following possibility:

1. Click somewhere below the arrow button in the sidebar. This will open the left sidebar only temporarily; as soon as you move your mouse pointer outside the sidebar, it will disappear automatically.

Workspace related information on the dashboard

On the dashboard (Overview tab) you not only see the name of the current workspace (Products & Services in this example) but usually a description of the workspace as well.

Workspace related information in list views

In list views there is no workspace title. But for every item in the list you can see the workspace it belongs to (next to each item, in the color of the respective workspace).

Editing workspaces

There are two ways how you can edit the workspace properties. The most common way is to select a workspace in the left sidebar and then click on the edit icon next to it:

If you are an administrator you can go to the administration panel. There you get an hierarchical list with all workspaces in your Feng Office installation that lets you edit or delete any workspace:

Moving workspaces

Since workspaces are hierarchical, every workspace has its Parent Workspace. By changing this setting you can move a workspace to another position in the worspace hierarchy. When doing so Feng Office will ask you: Do you want to inherit all permissions from parent workspace? Click OK to inherit the permissions from the new parent workspace, or click Cancel if you want to keep only the existing permissions for your workspace.

Deleting workspaces

Workspaces can be deleted either on the Edit Workspace screen (there you can delete only that specific workspace) or in the Workspaces section of the administration panel (if you are an administrator).

Personal workspaces

Feng Office creates automatically a personal workspace for every user. As long as the default settings are not changed objects in this workspace are only visible to its owner.

Assigning objects to workspaces

At the beginning we told you that all information in Feng Office is organised in workspaces. But once more workspaces are not as simple as folders: Most information types can belong to more than one workspace at once - only a few information types can only be assigned to one single workspace at a time.

Single workspace objects

When you are editing a single workspace object, the first thing you see is the current workspace (Customer Success in this example):

Clicking on the current workspace brings up the workspace tree from the left side panel that lets you select another workspace (but only one):

Multiple workspace objects

When you are editing a multiple workspace object, you will see the workspace tree very much like in the left sidebar (including the filtering option). This lets you assign as many workspaces as you like for that object.

Default workspace

If you do not explicitly change it, objects are allocated to the current workspace by default. If you set the workspace selector to All then a new object is allocated to your personal workspace by default.

Trash workspace

The trash is a special workspace which contains objects that have been deleted (or more precisely: moved to the trash).

PLEASE NOTE: Comments to the wiki should only contain suggestions and questions that help us to improve the manual (and not the software). These comments will be deleted as soon as the information has been integrated into the manual.

Posts that do not contribute to the DOCUMENTATION of the project will be DELETED.

OK, so what is a workspace?
The writing here is so general that I am lacking a clear handle on what in the world to do with this feature. I am catching that it probably is tremendously helpful since filters are much more useful than folders and it probably has something to do with making a custom view of a number of objects. Yet, since it is a new concept to me and many others, maybe starting with a very clear real world example would be helpful.

Allen Look, 2010-02-26 00:52

The page states “If you are an administrator you can go to the administration panel. There you get an alphabetically ordered list with all workspaces in your Feng Office installation that lets you edit or delete any workspace:”.

I believe that the list of workspaces is now in hierarchical order, and not in alphabetical order?

Martin Sauter, 2010-02-27 15:20

You are right, this has been changed recently. The wiki is updated now. Thank you for letting us know.

Francisco Burbano, 2010-04-26 15:11

I have a question, it is possible to copy an entire workspace to another?, and if is possible, how can I do it? Thanks

Marcos Saiz, 2010-04-30 16:09

Not possible yet.

sathyanarayana sastry, 2010-09-01 06:01

Thank you for the reply.

Hrachya, 2010-09-02 06:56

Is it possible to create user who can edit some workspaces, but some workspaces only read?

Thank you.

Marcos Saiz, 2010-09-02 08:56

Not possible currently.

Daniel Orr, 2010-09-05 00:31

We are using the email integration in a limited fashion by checking one IMAP folder.

At the moment it defaults to the “All” Workspace; it is desirable to change it to default to the “Personal” Workspace.

I am most likely missing it; is there an option available for this or a way for us to change it?

Francisco Ponce de León, 2010-09-06 17:58

Actually, the 'All' Workspace already is set to “Personal” by default. You may check that when clicking on the “Workspaces” tab when creating the new email account, which is hidden by default. However, this will not be hidden anymore in the 1.7.1 version, which is coming out soon! This version will also allow you to synchronize the emails you have sent and will sent through IMAP, so you have them stored at your mail server too

Thomas, 2011-03-11 14:32

Is there any option to sort the workspaces,by any other criteria then alphabetically?

Francisco Ponce de León, 2011-03-11 15:00

Right now Feng Office does not count with such feature, but if you happen to get someone to develop it or if you would like to help sponsoring it (you may do this contacting sales@fengoffice.com), we would be happy to add it in our next release.